Youngblood hawke, p.47
Youngblood Hawke, page 47
The clock read a quarter to four when the wail throbbed in the night air. There were other baby cries in the hospital, but this was different: sharp, angry, protesting, rhythmic, raw. Jeanne, Hawke, and Mrs. Hawke looked at each other. Weltmann slowly raised his head, the wig ridiculously awry, his mouth hanging open, his eyes staring. A nurse walked out of the delivery room, a small thin woman with carroty hair. As she passed by them, going into Nancy's room, she said offhandedly, "It's a boy and everything's all right."
John Weltmann called after her, "My wife? My wife?"
"Fine." The nurse began straightening Nancy's bed. The wheeled table appeared after a while, with Nancy flat on it, her hair in disorder, her face wet, gray and exhausted, her eyes brilliant, the lump at her waistline much reduced. "Did you see him?" she said smiling, and making a feeble gesture with one hand. "He's back there in the cage." Weltmann ran after the table, grasping Nancy's hand. The others hurried down the corridor to the turn where an arrow read "Nursery." Behind a glass wall in a dimly lit room there were baskets on wheeled racks covered with thin white cloths, each basket labelled with a family name in thick black crayon: Napier, Carter, Holcomb, Caudill. A masked nurse appeared, pushing along a rack with a basket labelled WELTMANN. She propped it up at the glass window and there was the baby. She smiled and waved at them, and walked off.
The baby was yawning, stretching, and blinking great blue eyes. It was clean, pink, totally and amazingly human, with a square, determined face not unlike Hawke's. He had expected to see a red scrawny monkey-like creature, but Nancy's baby was beautiful; he thought it the most beautiful thing his eyes had ever seen.
"Well, he's sure got plenty of hair, that's one thing," Mrs. Hawke said. The baby indeed had a thick black thatch of hair.
Hawke said, "It's astounding. I had no idea babies could yawn and stretch."
"What did you think they did?" Jeanne said in a breaking voice. "They're people."
He looked at her and saw that tears were pouring down her cheeks, and she was not wiping them. He touched his handkerchief to the rivulets on her face. "What the devil are you crying about?"
"Who's crying?" Jeanne said.
Weltmann came treading heavily into the nursery, walked up to the window, and looked through the glass at the baby without expression. Its eyes were closed, it was still yawning ferociously, and moving its tiny arms at random. From the neck down it was swathed in a blue blanket.
"Well, John, do you like him?" Mrs. Hawke said. "I'd say he's a pretty good specimen."
Weltmann fell to his knees, his head bowed against the glass. For an instant Hawke thought he had fainted, and reached to support him. Then he heard his brother-in-law saying, "Thank God, thank God." After a silent moment Weltmann stood and looked around at them with a foolish happy look, his eyes red, his mouth loose. "I have to build a church," he said. "I don't know where, I don't suppose they want a Lutheran church in Hovey, but I have to build a church. There's no hurry, I don't have to build it tomorrow, so long as I build it." He looked at the baby. "Did you ever see so much hair?"
5
Hawke drove his mother home, and then took Jeanne to a highway diner framed in gaudy neon, the all-night oasis of the truck drivers. As he whirled into the parking space among the coal trucks and trailer diesels, Jeanne said, "I don't know. I'm not exactly dressed for a diner, am I?" She glanced down at her rumpled frock. "Lord! I look as though I'd been sleeping in the rain."
"This is where everybody goes after a dance or a party. Come on."
There were about a dozen drivers in the brightly lit, white-tiled diner, big cheerful men in tan or blue work clothes, smoking, eating, drinking beer, talking. A wonderful aroma of fresh coffee triumphed over the tobacco and food smells. Hawke and Jeanne sat at a little table, and some of the drivers glanced at Jeanne with friendly appreciative grins. A burly young man in green coveralls said, "Hey Art, you up early or late?"
Hawke said, "Late, Earl. Old Nancy just had herself a boy up to the miner's hospital."
"Hey, a boy! You an uncle, I allow. She'd a had a girl you'd be a aunt." Hawke joined happily in the laugh. "Nancy all right?"
"Just fine." Hawke repeated the news to Dan, the fat red-faced man in a chef's cap who came out of the kitchen, and Dan shook his hand and slapped his back and served two cold beers on the house at once.
Jeanne liked diners, they reminded her of college dances, of the glowing befuddled aftermath of necking, and she particularly liked this one, where Hawke was so much at home. It occurred to her, as he sat before her drinking beer in his tan windbreaker, unshaven and tousle-headed, his knuckles still grimy from mine dust, exchanging repartee with Dan in hill jargon, that he seemed much more like one of the drivers than like Youngblood Hawke, the Pulitzer Prize novelist.
By now Jeanne knew scores of writers. Her early awe of them, which had drawn her to the publishing business, was extinct. She considered them a sorry lot, petty shy incompetent self-pitying egoists, filled with envious hatred of each other. It had been her fortune, or her misfortune, to meet Hawke at the outset: Hawke, who was generous about other authors, who moved through literary parties with awkward good nature and was jovial even with the scribblers of venomous reviews about his books, who came to her time after time alight with enthusiasm about new novels, sometimes the current best sellers and sometimes obscure and difficult European works, who was more widely read than anyone she knew, but hardly ever referred to his reading, who tempered his maniacal self-confidence with a peculiar lack of pride in any of his completed work. She knew he believed at bottom that he was something like a Balzac reborn. If she did not detest him for this it was because she suspected it might almost be true, and also because this opinion of himself was not reflected in conceit or in literary airs, but in obsessive drudgery. Nobody worked like Hawke, nobody at Hodge Hathaway, nobody in the American literary scene, so far as she knew. He sat opposite her, pale, pouchy-eyed, but afire with the excitement of the birth and with gusto for the food Dan set before them. She did not know when he had last closed his eyes in sleep, or for how long. She only knew that he had left her at the hotel near midnight and had gone to the mine at dawn, after depositing at the hotel an envelope containing almost a whole new act of a play, scrawled on forty yellow sheets. During these two weeks in Hovey, when he had been hewing the play out of Alms for Oblivion, he had not stopped working on the novel Will Horne. "Fellow's got to carry water on both shoulders sometimes," he had told her once, with weary good cheer.
Karl was right, she thought, Arthur was a giant, and this was what a giant was like; bigger than other men, coarser, gentler, in some ways simpler, or even weaker, a careless benign volcano of a man. She had loved him, she had hated him, she had been repeatedly angry at him, but after all Karl had spoken the truth, the not entirely bitter truth, that her work with Youngblood Hawke was almost her life. This was true though for two years she had been Mrs. Karl Fry, and knew only Karl in the last intimacies that should have been at the center of her life. She fell to eating the scrambled eggs and bacon with all the gay hunger of a girl who has been out all night dancing.
And Hawke—Hawke thought these were the best eggs he had eaten in his life, golden yellow, scrambled in plenty of butter just short of dry, a curly mound of four eggs surrounded with heaps of bacon; Dan always piled on the bacon, and it was always right too, drained of grease, and there was a huge plate of perfect French fried potatoes too, crisp to the teeth but meal-white inside, good truck-driver food, and the new rolls were still warm, and the beer was sharp cold, and Dan's coffee at five in the morning was the best on earth, because Dan scrubbed out that goddamned urn and scalded it before he started coffee again! Dan's coffee had the exalting, the almost sacramental lift to it of the fresh coffee he had drunk at dawn on the beach at Iwo Jima, bulldozing the black sand heaps of the unloading area, with guns popping in the interior of the island, red tracer bullets rising in dotted lines to the green sky, and a plane bursting into a rose of flame and slowly falling and twisting . . . Jeanne, as she ate, was looking at him with an intoxicating light in her eye, a light she had long been suppressing. Hawke laughed out loud, for no reason at all and struck the table with his fist so that all the plates jumped, and said, "By God, isn't this food good?"
She said, "It's wonderful. It's marvellous."
He said, "And am I crazy or is Nancy's baby unusually beautiful? Uncles aren't supposed to be starry-eyed like parents."
Jeanne said, "I've seen a lot of babies. This one beats them all. I don't understand it, he's the image of you and I wouldn't call you beautiful, but that baby is a vision, he makes you believe all the stories of angels dropped from the skies. I could commit murder and steal that baby. Arthur Hawke, for heaven's sake, stop eating like a wolf. Slow down."
"What in hell are you talking about? You've eaten four rolls to my two and you've already finished your bacon and eggs."
"The man only gave me half as much."
"Have some more."
"No, no. Conceivably another beer, if there's another one that cold."
Hawke roared at Dan for more cold beer. He could not understand why the truck drivers kept looking at him and Jeanne, in a friendly amused way. The other aspect of Hawke's extraordinary ability to take in and remember details was an almost incredible obtuseness, sometimes, to plain reality. It did not occur to him that there was anything odd in his sitting in the diner at half-past five in the morning with a pretty young woman in a pink cotton frock, a woman with New York style, moreover, as conspicuous in Hovey as a polar bear, nor did it strike him that he and she were laughing and looking at each other like lovers. He was genuinely amazed when Earl Fouts, the driver in green coveralls who had grown up with him on High Street, stopped on his way out and slapped him on the shoulder. "Well, you tell Nancy for me nice going, hear? Maybe you two be next in line."
They both rocked with laughter. Nothing, it seemed, could go wrong with this moment; nothing could dim their mood, a single mood that wrapped both of them in a transparent sparkling cloud.
Hawke said, slipping into workman's speech, "Jeanne, these fellows gonna have me believing we married. Mind now you don't let me do nothing absent-minded when I take you to the hotel."
She only laughed louder.
The truck men kept coming and going in the long narrow diner ablaze with white light. From the jukebox a hill singer lamented that the only girl he ever loved was marrying his best friend. To Hawke the scene in the diner had taken on the sharp, light-bathed truth of a painting—the long clean counter of gray plastic and stainless steel, the row of stools, the shining urns, the menus on the wall of white movable letters embedded in black strips, the gaudy jukebox, Dan in his white chef's cap, the brawny drivers in blue jeans and brown windbreakers—all seemed to have fallen into a static composition in a frame, a painting of a scene of his youth. It was as though Jeanne were not there, and yet there too—a lovely memory, or a ghost, because this was Dan's Diner in Hovey, and he was nineteen, and he knew no person named Mrs. Jeanne Fry; but he was buoyantly happy with the knowledge that he was going to do great things some day, and marry the most famous and sought-after beauty in the world.
"You know something, Jeanie?" he said. "I used to think Hovey was the world's capital of ignorance, stupidity, pettiness, and greed, and all I had to do was escape beyond the hills to find the fair world and the fair people of the novels and the movies. I know now that Hovey is simply the place where I first saw human nature, and where I first encountered resistance to my big opinion of myself. That's what ruined it for me. But that would have been true of any place where I grew up. Hovey's a nice place, the air is good and the hills are magnificent, and the people are all right. They haven't had the advantages of the city people and they have their narrow and mean streaks but by Christ they're Americans. There wasn't an able-bodied man or boy walking the streets of Hovey in the war. It was a town of women and children and creeping old men. Except a few miners that got kept on the job, and half of them had a bad arm or a bad leg or something. I'm not saying it's a birthplace of heroes but—I be goddamn. It's dawn, Jeanne. Look at that sky! My nephew's first day on this screwy planet."
"This is scandalous. Take me to the hotel," Jeanne said.
"Are you sleepy?"
"God, no. I'm vibrating. It's like I used to be in exam week after I'd had four benzedrine pills. But I mean, Arthur, we both need sleep. Especially you!"
A chill wind was blowing outside, and Hawke went into a spasm of deep harsh coughing. Jeanne said anxiously, "You'd better take something for that."
"I'm just tired."
Hawke sang his high school song for her as they drove to the hotel, and she then sang the songs of her school, to much laughter. They both were buoyed along in the same exultant mood, a spirit almost of adolescent dating, a mixture of fatigue and merriment radiant with keen sexual desire that had to remain unfulfilled. It was a great mood, and Hawke at least was having thoughts of going up to Jeanne's room and extracting a few kisses from her. After all! The mood collapsed in an instant for both of them when Jeanne went to the hotel desk to get her key, and the sleepy Negro boy took a yellow telegram out of her box.
She said, ripping it open, "When did they deliver this?"
"Dunno, mum. I came on at midnight. It was in de box."
She read the wire and looked at Hawke with a face from which all gaiety had departed. "When's the first plane out of Lexington today, Arthur?"
"About four in the afternoon on the new schedule. What's the matter?"
"Karl's in Washington. He wants me."
"What's he doing there?"
Jeanne started to talk, then stopped. After a slight pause she said, "That's beside the point. I'd better pack and get right on down to Lexington. Can I rent a car here and drop it off there?"
"Jeanne, go ahead and pack if you want, and then get a few hours' sleep. I'll come for you at half-past twelve and drive you down."
"That's pointless. You'll waste a day."
"The hell it's pointless. You're not driving on that road with those coal trucks roaring both ways. Look, do as I say. I'll make your plane reservation."
"Arthur, I can take care of myself."
"Shut up and go to sleep for a while. If you don't I'll fire you. You're not a good editor anyway, I'm just keeping you on because you're pretty."
Jeanne laughed in a deeply weary, resigned tone. "I hate a bully. I have your play script upstairs, and all—"
"I'll come and get it."
He had entered Jeanne's suite only half a dozen times in the three weeks she had been in Hovey. She had contrived to avoid having him there, and he had not especially wanted to torment himself with isolation that could lead to nothing. He was not going to force Jeanne Fry into adultery; he was not sure the possibility existed, but in any case, the conduct he accepted as normal with Frieda Winter was impossible with Jeanne. Now he went upstairs with her, and they stood in the dowdy, dusty room in the early morning light, and she handed him his pages neatly bound in a red portfolio. Their exhilaration was utterly quenched. The project of snatching kisses seemed boyish folly.
"Jeanne, I'm sorry you have to rocket off like this."
"So am I. But the job's just about done, anyway, and I must go. Dan's Diner is the greatest restaurant on earth. I'll never forget it, Arthur."
When Hawke got home he went upstairs, walking softly to avoid waking his mother, and put himself at the old tiny desk, where yellow pages lay in two squared-off piles: the novel and the play. He sat and stared at the two piles, lacking the will to take the pen in his hand. It was the old pen with which he had written everything since the first night in Kwajalein when he had without forethought begun a play about the Seabees. The rubber tube in the pen had long since rotted; he had replaced it, but the pumping lever no longer worked; he had broken several pen points and inserted others; nothing was really left of the pen he had started with but the black plastic barrel. Yet he would write with nothing else, though he had to dip it in a bottle of ink now after every few lines. Once he grasped the pen his hand started to move across the page; the thing had acquired talismanic force, together with the old watch that always lay beside it.
This time, however, he did not think even that magic could work. Fatigue was so soaked in his bones that breathing seemed to come hard, and he was still coughing. In a space of thirty-six hours or so he had rattled off almost a whole new act of a play, each line of which had felt as correct as a piece of a jigsaw clicking into place; he had been in the mine, revelling in the rough friendly talk of the miners, and the powerful good feel of the big loading machine; he had talked to Givney, exchanged financial cabalisms with him, and he could still see before his eyes the publisher's cunning pencilled legend
Youngblood Hawke | $1,000,000;
he had seen Nancy's baby, a revelation like the first tent evangelist's speech which had sent him running forward to fall on his knees, a boy of eleven, to declare for Christ. His thoughts were little more than pillow fantasies, though he was sitting up: thoughts of recapturing Jeanne from Karl Fry; thoughts of what he would do after collecting Givney's million, thoughts of abandoning the quest for money, fleeing his present life, and going to England or Italy and Mexico and living like a miser, of dropping the three intervening novels he had planned and starting at once on The American Comedy. The anxious depression that often came with excessive fatigue had him in its grip, and a scary headache ran like a quarter-circle of hot metal from the top of his head down to his right ear.
